Web usability factors and usability testing of POTOVANJE.SI portal

Simon Meglič (2009) Web usability factors and usability testing of POTOVANJE.SI portal. MSc thesis.

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Abstract

Usability and user experience are one of the most critical success factors of products and services. In my master's assignment I put more stress on the usability of web portals. From my experience and the literature from the world known experts in this field, I summarized the guidelines that help making a user-friendly portal. By following these guidelines we can prevent many usability errors, but only the compliance with the guidelines is not enough. It is advisable to think about the usability in very early stages of a product development, a development of a portal, or a service. For this purpose became popular a new way of development “The User Centered Development”, which tells us how to integrate the concern for the usability to various stages of the development. The sooner the usability error is detected, the cheaper is the way to correct it. There are several methods verifying usability. Testing five to ten users with realistic scenarios in the laboratory has proven the most effective. In the empirical part of the assignment I have done a usability testing of a travel portal www.potovanje.si. I chose six users belonging to the target group of Potovanje d.o.o. company and gave them five real tasks on the portal. The laboratory usability testing was conducted in order to tape the user's screen image, to record the facial mimicry and the user's voice. In the next room there was an usability expert who tried to mark observations and to identify as many errors in usability. After a careful analysis of these observations, I presented 107 concrete solutions and suggestions how to improve the user experience on the site of the company. Later, I also performed the same tasks based on the same scenario by myself in order to get the ideal values of the variables. The survey showed that the key indicators (time spent on the task, the mouse pointer distance) deviated much more than the permissible 75% of the ideal values (set by me), which means that the portal has many opportunities to be improved. My aim is to decrease the deviation to less than 75% from the ideal value. The focus of the analysis is more on getting qualitative results than quantitative ones, which is advised by most of the usability gurus. The survey has achieved its purpose, because the company Potovanje d.o.o. got a lot of solutions and pieces of advice how to improve the user experience on www.potovanje.si.

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